(This is part of my journey going checking out Star Control 2. You can follow the entire series on the Retro Gaming page.)

The Melnorme are a font of useful gossip that can spark a lot of actionable quests. One such mention is the fact that the Mycon (space fungus) had purposefully destroyed the homeworld of the Syreen (space babes) to terriform it into a compatible volcano world. Or, as the game calls such projects, “shattered worlds.” You see one such world in the header up there.

I go in search of the Syreen, who are living on a shielded slave world much the same as Earth. This is the second such planet I’ve seen in the game to date.

Naturally, you can make all sorts of flirty and tacky comments to the Syreen commander (yes, that’s how she naturally dresses and lounges while working). She’s not in the mood for it; she wants to know why a human vessel is here.

Following the destruction of their planet (which the Syreen thought was a meteor up to now), the remaining race took off in space habitats to look for another world to settle. They got caught up in the Alliance out of a hope of surviving, but when the Alliance fell apart and the Ur-Quan surrounded them, the Syreen surrendered. Oddly enough, the Ur-Quan didn’t destroy them, but provided them a planet on which to settle — and then shielded them inside. This oddly compassionate gesture is so weird. I don’t understand why the Ur-Quan are fine with leaving non-compliant races alive.

Anyway, since the remaining population of the Syreen is mostly women, as the females made up their space forces, that’s why we’re only encountering this one sex in the game.

I show the starbase commander the Mycon egg — the Deep One — and she flips out. This might be the thing to bring the Syreen out of complacency and toward resistance.

I leave and come back to the station. Talana here says that the Syreen are willing to join forces, provided that I help give them revenge on the Mycons. That means I also need to discover where the Ur-Quan locked up the Syreen fighting ships (which are called Penetrators… because apparently 15-year-old boys designed this portion of the game).

Also, Talana tells me that she’s totally cool with going out on a date with me. My wife is going to have a really bizarre reason to divorce me: “He fell in love with a video game intergalactic vixen from 1992!”

I find the, ahem, Penetrators on a somewhat hostile planet world and release them to the Syreen. The Ur-Quan have the galaxy’s worst locksmiths.

With the fleet freed up, the Syreen are positioned to get their revenge. But first, I’m to help them set a trap by luring the Mycon into a system suitable for colonization.

Before that… well, it is possible to have a romantic liason with Talana. Just saying. The game shows nothing but fades the screen out and presents everything with (funny) dialogue options:

This is how we learned about sex in the early ’90s.

The space jellyfish fall for it, hook, line, and sexy sinker.

As the Syreen go full-out war on the Mycon and decimate their fleet, I go on a separate mission to recover the Syreen’s Sun Device that’s been guarded on one of the Mycon worlds. It takes a little fighting to get there, but it’s worth it in the end.

I return to Talana to find an exuberant Syreen commander. She reports that justice has been served and the Mycon fleet sliced to ribbons. Even better, she’s going to send the Penetrator ships and officers over my way.

Talana recommends that I seek out the Chenjesu and find a way to lower the shields on the slave worlds. Sounds like good advice.